The prince who came down from his tower

Jeff Shesol -- who wasn't born until two years after the hotel kitchen -- tells us in "Mutual Contempt" that the hatred of Bobby and L.B.J. for each other shadowed and shaped every aspect of our swamp-fever politics in the '60s, from Vietnam to civil rights to the Great Society. While the obvious reasons for their hard feelings are specified at prurient length (with a slight tilt in Bobby's favor), not quite so obvious, and mostly unspecified, are the ways in which this personal antipathy did any such shaping. Had they liked each other, would we have been spared Nixon alone at night in a darkened wing of the White House, listening to himself on tape, as if Watergate were a play by Beckett? Would Bobby have stayed in the Cabinet rather than run for the Senate? Would L.B.J. not have escalated, nor pushed through the 1964 civil-rights bill, nor dreamed up and then abandoned his War on Poverty -- which faltered, incidentally, not because money ran out in the open wound of Southeast Asia but because will ran out in Congress; not because "maximum feasible participation" by the poor didn't work but because it might have, and the ripple effects of Head Start among sharecroppers in Mississippi, Vista among coal miners in Appalachia, rural legal assistance for California farmworkers and community corporations in inner-city Newark terrified the local pols. Neither Shesol, though he has access to oral histories that flesh out what had before been merely adumbrated, nor Beran, though he bristles with the internal contradictions of a work in progress that ended at age 42, tells us much we didn't know from the first generation of Bobby books -- the valentines by Ed Guthman, David Halberstam, Penn Kimball, Jack Newfield, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Jules Witcover, or the hatchet jobs by Ralph de Toledano and Victor Lasky -- and considerably less about Bobby as attorney general than we learned from Victor Navasky in "Kennedy Justice." Nor does either of them credit the rest of the republic -- the freedom-riders, the war-resisters and the flower children; the teachers, clergy and angel-headed hipsters; the gospel, folk songs, anthems, rock and blues; the rainbow shape of moral passion made coherent -- for ending the long Ike snooze, for opening windows as if they were veins. Once more tediously, history consists of what white men do in the daytime, for which they get famous.

Maxwell Taylor Kennedy -- three years old when Bobby died in Los Angeles -- has edited his father's private journal, his day thoughts, night shrieks and those snippets of Great Writers and tragic poets that he chose to copy down for meditation, into a handsome little commemorative volume with an affecting mix of candid snapshots and speech writer aperçus, entitled "Make Gentle the Life of This World: The Vision of Robert F. Kennedy." Quoted most often by far is Albert Camus, 20 times by my count. There's a clear sense here of Bobby's growth through pain to an appreciation of the reality of lives less gaudy; of the distance he traveled, against his will, from Camelot, that swashbuckling James Bond wet dream of witty violence, insolent cool, dry Martinis, brand-name snobbery, killer gadgets, musical beds, gang-bang counterinsurgency scenarios, contempt for women and for other cultures; why he came to be believed in Watts and Johannesburg -- even his startling statement, on emerging from a mine shaft in the ocean floor off Chile, where the miners had all been Communists: "If I worked in this mine, I'd be a Communist, too." And a resonant passage from Hemingway, before Papa ate his gun:

If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them or break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break, it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too, but there will be no special hurry.

This is the mood of "Robert F. Kennedy: A Memoir," a three-hour wallow in feeling lousy, on the Discovery cable channel Sunday, June 7, from 8 to 11 pm. The first hour is narrated by Glenn Close, the second by Mario Cuomo, the third by Ving Rhames -- a not untypical smorgasbord of enthusiasts. Throughout, Jack Newfield of the New York Daily News interviews the children, the colleagues, the surprising Shirley MacLaine (a Bobby-pledged delegate to the 1968 Chicago convention), the inevitable Doris Kearns Goodwin and those journalists (Pete Hamill, Jimmy Breslin, Peter Maas, Murray Kempton) who can be counted on to feel that more than a Kennedy died 30 years ago. Maas tells the story of a devastated attorney general showing up at a Christmas party for orphans, in 1963, just because he'd promised to; being greeted by a small child who shouted, "They killed your brother! They killed your brother!" and then burst into tears; picking her up, stroking her head and assuring her, "That's all right -- I've got another." So I'm feeling lousy right along with them. He was the last American politician I cared about or cried for, the only one since Lincoln as novelistically interesting as, say, a Havel or Mandela. Clinton tells us that he feels our pain. Bobby embodied it. "Unacceptable" was his mantra, as "intolerable" was Wittgenstein's. Then he'd do something radical to fix it, which never seemed to him enough. Has there ever been a sadder pair of eyes, so much brokenness that mended badly, such a sense of swimming up from bends of despair toward an empathic grasp of all who are dispossessed, all that's bereft? "Sirhan Sirhan is a Yippie!" said Jerry Rubin, that poisoned Twinkie. But Robert Lowell wrote another epitaph, full of loneliness like "a thin smoke thread of vital air":

For them, like a prince, you daily left your tower
to walk through dirt in your best cloth. Here now,
alone, in my Plutarchan bubble, I miss
you, you out of Plutarch, made by hand --
Forever approaching our maturity."

Actually, Bobby said his favorite poet was Aeschylus, for the tragedy. And, from Aeschylus, his favorite lines: "In our sleep, pain which we cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God." Forget El Cid. Like the Camus he quoted so often, or the Orwell who shows only on a rare occasion, we invoke Bobby to look better to ourselves. We wear his skin, as if from a wolf or bear we've slain. Or, as Kurt Vonnegut once recommended that we read great books -- "the way a young cannibal might eat the hearts of brave old enemies." Or as Denver warned her ghostly sister about their difficult mother in Toni Morrion's "Beloved": "Watch out for her; she can give you dreams."

• View blog reactions